Antony Mayfield has an interesting post on specualtion that social banking (things like peer-to-peer lending) could account for 10% of all retail lending in a couple of years.
This comes via Jason Gardner, blogging with refreshing honesty from within Lloyds TSB. I like the idea of a banker who does thought experiments like this one:
As a thought exercise, I’ve been wondering if it is possible, these days, to do without a bank at all and still have a relatively normal life. And by normal, I don’t mean keeping cash under the mattress. I’m talking about a proper banking relationship, but without the bank account.
Actually, I’ve done some work in the retail banking sector recently (sorry to be opaque but I signed a very weird NDA) and these guys are clearly paying attention to the changes all around us. Whether they can develop an effective response is a whole other question.
